Year(s) Funded: 2025-2026
Topic(s): Health Services, Healthcare Access, Hospitals and Clinics, Maternal Health, Women
Project Lead: Katy Kozhimannil
This project will build on UMNRHRC’s dataset on maternity care access, which now includes neonatal care at US hospitals. It will describe access to childbirth-related care for families living in rural communities, with a focus on neonatal care for infants with acute clinical needs. While basic well-infant care is routinely provided in conjunction with basic obstetric care, this project will examine access to higher-level neonatal care, which provides specialty care to infants with unexpected complications or conditions immediately after birth. Understanding the availability of higher-level neonatal care for rural communities compared with urban communities is not yet known. Additionally, recognizing the factors that predict whether a rural community has access to higher-level neonatal care can help inform clinical and policy efforts to ensure availability and access to essential, life-saving infant care at the time of childbirth.
This project seeks to identify and describe 1) characteristics of rural and urban counties with and without access to higher-level neonatal care, 2) mapping rural and urban counties with a) no obstetric/well-infant and no higher-level neonatal care, b) obstetric/well-infant but no higher-level neonatal care, or c) both obstetric/well-infant and higher-level neonatal care), and 3) independent predictors of discordance in level of obstetric/well-infant and neonatal care available in rural counties. Despite the interdependence of neonatal and obstetric services,3 a comprehensive examination of access to basic and/or specialty childbirth-related hospital-based care is lacking. This project’s goal is to describe access to childbirth-related care for families living in rural and urban communities, including attention to rural communities without access to either neonatal or obstetric services, and those communities with obstetric and well-infant care, but without higher-level neonatal care.